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Comment by njharman | Hacker News Reader

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njharman

I too think its the most interesting.

But of course its their business to know who usess their service and choose whom to allow to use it.

Facebook use is not a right!

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> Facebook use is not a right

I always get downvoted for saying this but ... it’s getting that way. Facebook has become the primary social and contact mechanism for a large number of people. The network effects start to transcend the point where someone unelected in an office in California should get to decide who benefits from it and who doesn’t.

Facebook needs regulating, urgently.

It actually is that way to some extent in Germany already. There were a number of court cases against them where the court forced FB to undo a ban or restore a deleted post.

Facebook monopolization of the market is not a right, either. And I think they'll find that out the hard way - sooner rather than later, precisely because they're so clearly abusive of that monopoly position.

I agree that they should have the ability to choose who uses their service and who doesn't.

it just seems like a really weird decision - the benefits of removing people who are currently incarcerated seem minimal compared to the risk of mistakenly flagging somebody.

When a service is getting to the point of universal usage, where you can't even keep contact with your friends without it, it gets close to being a right. What if you get innocently banned and all your friends are only contactable over facebook? You can't even book a time with the hairdresser because the only contact way they use is facebook?

Even if you never mistakenly flag somebody, there's still the developer cost to create the feature and maintain it. There's the cost of slower development whenever this feature interferes with another feature. And assuming it's not 100% automated (which it sounds like it's not because it sounds like both police and Callum were asked to submit papers), there's the cost of humans to manually respond to submissions.

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